Chapter 29: A
The sound of the Sky-Reaper's engines failing was like the groan of a dying beast. The massive brass vessel tilted sharply, its stabilization runes flickering as the Absolute Zero frost consumed its core. It didn't fall straight down; it slid through the air, heading toward the jagged peaks of the northern ridge.
Clevatess stood amidst the swirling snow of the pass, his midnight-black tunic undisturbed by the chaos. He watched as the Sun-Weaver, stripped of their glowing threads, crawled backward. The iridescent robes that once shimmered with solar law were now nothing more than frozen rags.
You think you have won a battle, the Weaver wheezed, their breath forming thick clouds in the sub-zero air. But the Queen... she has already branded you. You are not a King to her. You are a Ghost. A Malfunction. A Shadow that stayed too long.
Clevatess looked down, his eyes like two violet stars in the darkness of his hood. Names are for those who need to be found, he said, his voice steady. I have been called the King of the Night, the Absolute Zero, and the Keeper of the Grave. But to your Queen, you may tell her I am the Inevitable.
He turned his back on the defeated Weaver, gesturing for Alicia and Nelluru to follow. We cannot let that ship crash into the valley below, Clevatess commanded. There is a village at the base of that ridge. If the Reaper's thermal core explodes upon impact, the fire will do what the Sun-Gate could not. It will erase them.
Alicia gripped the hilt of her blade, her blue aura flaring with renewed purpose. We're too far away to catch it!
Then we will not catch it, Clevatess replied. We will anchor it.
He raised both hands toward the sky. The gold embroidery on his sleeves didn't just glow; it seemed to peel away from the fabric, turning into literal threads of violet mana that shot upward like harpoons. The threads pierced the brass hull of the falling Sky-Reaper, not to destroy it, but to bind it.
With a massive display of might, Clevatess pulled. The violet chains tightened, humming with a frequency that vibrated through the very bones of the mountain. The descent of the massive ship slowed. It buckaked and groaned, fighting against the King's grip, until it finally came to a hovering, frozen halt just meters above the jagged rocks.
Clevatess lowered his arms, his breathing unchanged. The ship was now a tomb of ice, suspended in the air by invisible chains of Absolute Zero.
Nelluru looked at the floating wreck in awe, her lime-green aura pulsing rapidly. You didn't just stop it. You made it part of the sky.
The King began to walk toward the northern path, his raven-feather mantle settled and still. Let it hang there as a warning, he said. The sun has set on the Iron Pass.
---